Abstract

In the 1980s, New Historicism was a strikingly innovative way of examining literary history, as well as practicing literary theory. Greatly influenced by the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, New Historicists in America and their British counterparts, Cultural Materialists, set to rewrite the history of Western literature in such a way as to challenge what they considered the socio-politically determined literary canon of the past. In practice, this meant that classical texts from Renaissance and Romanticism - Shakespeare's plays in particular - were re-viewed from a far less favorable perspective; great works of art were discovered to have been reproducing the discourses of power and sustained the system, without ever seriously challenging it - asserting thus the oppressive omnipotence of culture. This paper explores not so much the theory of New Historicism/Cultural Materialism but the potentially dangerous uses of both the assumptions these critics start from and the conclusions at which they arrive. The works examined closely are several essays by Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Sinfield in which they attempt to demonstrate that Shakespeare's plays, from King Henry IV to Othello, are the most powerful instruments for the promotion of culture. These interpretations are necessarily contrasted with the humanist tradition that set up Shakespeare as the most passionate explorer of Western culture and its many crimes